Pub Date : 2025-08-01DOI: 10.1016/j.polgeo.2025.103359
Mary Mostafanezhad
The COVID-19 pandemic accelerated the number of celebrity billionaires and other high-net-worth individuals buying land in Hawai'i. While scholars have addressed a range of dispossession practices in settler states, much less attention has been paid to how celebrity billionaire land acquisitions are accelerating the recreationalization of conservation, culture, and agrarianization. In this commentary response to Hiʻilei Julia Kawehipuaakahaopulani Hobart's (2024) article, “Indigenous Placemaking Amidst Settler Colonial Leisure: A Tale of Hawaiʻi's Living Parks,” I engage with her concept of 'compromise' to address the ongoing process of ‘accumulation by recreation.’ Accumulation by recreation accounts for the ongoing privatization of recreational landscapes. In Hawai'i, celebrity billionaires play an outsized role in shaping conservation frontiers by developing private partnerships with the state and other non-state entities. These practices echo Hobart's description of the mechanics of settler colonial dispossession, including the “compromises” communities were compelled to make in the context of mid-century park development in Hawai'i.
{"title":"Accumulation by recreation: Celebrity billionaire conservation in Hawai'i’s tourism landscape","authors":"Mary Mostafanezhad","doi":"10.1016/j.polgeo.2025.103359","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.polgeo.2025.103359","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>The COVID-19 pandemic accelerated the number of celebrity billionaires and other high-net-worth individuals buying land in Hawai'i. While scholars have addressed a range of dispossession practices in settler states, much less attention has been paid to how celebrity billionaire land acquisitions are accelerating the recreationalization of conservation, culture, and agrarianization. In this commentary response to Hiʻilei Julia Kawehipuaakahaopulani Hobart's (2024) article, “Indigenous Placemaking Amidst Settler Colonial Leisure: A Tale of Hawaiʻi's Living Parks,” I engage with her concept of 'compromise' to address the ongoing process of ‘accumulation by recreation.’ Accumulation by recreation accounts for the ongoing privatization of recreational landscapes. In Hawai'i, celebrity billionaires play an outsized role in shaping conservation frontiers by developing private partnerships with the state and other non-state entities. These practices echo Hobart's description of the mechanics of settler colonial dispossession, including the “compromises” communities were compelled to make in the context of mid-century park development in Hawai'i.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":48262,"journal":{"name":"Political Geography","volume":"121 ","pages":"Article 103359"},"PeriodicalIF":4.9,"publicationDate":"2025-08-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144826579","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2025-08-01DOI: 10.1016/j.polgeo.2025.103360
Clare M. Beer
This response critically reflects on three themes from Dr. Hi'ilei Julia Hobart's 2024 Political Geography plenary address, “Indigenous Place-making Amidst Settler Colonial Leisure.” Weaving together critiques of conservation and tourism, these themes help unsettle a key premise of liberal environmentalism: nature as universal public good. Hobart's insights deepen political-geographical understandings of state environment-making and Indigenous resistance, and how these shape ongoing struggles against socio-ecological violence and the inherent unsustainability of settler capitalism.
这一回应批判性地反映了Hi'ilei Julia Hobart博士在2024年政治地理学全体会议上的三个主题，“在定居者殖民休闲中创造土著场所”。这些主题将对自然保护和旅游业的批评交织在一起，有助于动摇自由环保主义的一个关键前提：自然是普遍的公共利益。霍巴特的见解加深了对国家环境制造和土著抵抗的政治-地理理解，以及这些如何形成对社会生态暴力和定居者资本主义固有不可持续性的持续斗争。
{"title":"Unsettling nature as liberal public good","authors":"Clare M. Beer","doi":"10.1016/j.polgeo.2025.103360","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.polgeo.2025.103360","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>This response critically reflects on three themes from Dr. Hi'ilei Julia Hobart's 2024 <em>Political Geography</em> plenary address, “Indigenous Place-making Amidst Settler Colonial Leisure.” Weaving together critiques of conservation and tourism, these themes help unsettle a key premise of liberal environmentalism: nature as universal public good. Hobart's insights deepen political-geographical understandings of state environment-making and Indigenous resistance, and how these shape ongoing struggles against socio-ecological violence and the inherent unsustainability of settler capitalism.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":48262,"journal":{"name":"Political Geography","volume":"121 ","pages":"Article 103360"},"PeriodicalIF":4.9,"publicationDate":"2025-08-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144826580","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2025-08-01DOI: 10.1016/j.polgeo.2024.103226
Hiʻilei Julia Kawehipuaakahaopulani Hobart
What does the production of public leisure space tell us about the 20th century mechanics of settler colonial dispossession? In the second half of the twentieth century, the nascent State of Hawaii expanded and developed its state parks system in an effort to enhance public leisure and natural resource conservation. In turn, several sites acquired for park facilities also catalyzed evictions and removals of the local and Indigenous people who lived there. This essay tracks the emergence of a compromise (attempted and in one case, successfully) to create a 'living park' in which residents would remain so that they might educate the public on traditional Native Hawaiian lifeways. This essay describes how midcentury park development did the work of Indigenous removal and erasure by neutralizing and democratizing park space: state-funded leisure space for all radically precluded Indigenous placemaking at a time when Kanaka Maoli communities felt the generational effects of American assimilation most acutely. Ultimately, this essay builds upon scholarly critiques leveraged against conservation politics in order to reveal the dispossessive logics bound up in the envisioning of settler colonial leisure space. Such an understanding offers fresh insight into the violences that occur when space is rendered ‘natural’ and ‘neutral’ and explores the decolonial possibilities embedded in Indigenous placemaking beyond leisure.
{"title":"Indigenous placemaking amidst settler colonial leisure: A tale of Hawaiʻi's living parks","authors":"Hiʻilei Julia Kawehipuaakahaopulani Hobart","doi":"10.1016/j.polgeo.2024.103226","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.polgeo.2024.103226","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>What does the production of public leisure space tell us about the 20th century mechanics of settler colonial dispossession? In the second half of the twentieth century, the nascent State of Hawaii expanded and developed its state parks system in an effort to enhance public leisure and natural resource conservation. In turn, several sites acquired for park facilities also catalyzed evictions and removals of the local and Indigenous people who lived there. This essay tracks the emergence of a compromise (attempted and in one case, successfully) to create a 'living park' in which residents would remain so that they might educate the public on traditional Native Hawaiian lifeways. This essay describes how midcentury park development did the work of Indigenous removal and erasure by neutralizing and democratizing park space: state-funded leisure space for <em>all</em> radically precluded Indigenous placemaking at a time when Kanaka Maoli communities felt the generational effects of American assimilation most acutely. Ultimately, this essay builds upon scholarly critiques leveraged against conservation politics in order to reveal the dispossessive logics bound up in the envisioning of settler colonial leisure space. Such an understanding offers fresh insight into the violences that occur when space is rendered ‘natural’ and ‘neutral’ and explores the decolonial possibilities embedded in Indigenous placemaking beyond leisure.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":48262,"journal":{"name":"Political Geography","volume":"121 ","pages":"Article 103226"},"PeriodicalIF":4.9,"publicationDate":"2025-08-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144826572","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2025-08-01DOI: 10.1016/j.polgeo.2025.103350
Chris Lizotte
{"title":"The present and absent Jew in anti-Zionist geographic imaginaries","authors":"Chris Lizotte","doi":"10.1016/j.polgeo.2025.103350","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.polgeo.2025.103350","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":48262,"journal":{"name":"Political Geography","volume":"121 ","pages":"Article 103350"},"PeriodicalIF":4.9,"publicationDate":"2025-08-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144826582","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2025-07-19DOI: 10.1016/j.polgeo.2025.103390
Andreas Malm , Kristoffer Ekberg , Christina Englund , Johanne Tagmose Grønkjær , Martin Charlier , Olivia Medin , Ståle Holgersen
Sweden has swiftly transitioned from being considered a progressive pioneer in climate mitigation to the forefront of late obstruction. The proximate cause was the general elections in 2022, after which the Sweden Democrats (SD) gained authority over the country's climate policies. This paper explores how the far right turned Sweden from a (reputed) pioneer of climate mitigation to an obstructor, and discuss if this transition is also an expression of a ‘green national paradox’. Through interviews with SD members and analysis of political documents, we observe how the SD explicitly and extensively exploits Sweden's progressive image to justify its obstructionist climate agenda. Focusing on energy and transportation policies, our study delves into the SD's perception of Sweden's global climate role and discusses how this is used by the far right in their policies towards climate mitigation.
{"title":"Green national paradox? How the far right turned Sweden from a (reputed) pioneer of climate mitigation to an obstructor","authors":"Andreas Malm , Kristoffer Ekberg , Christina Englund , Johanne Tagmose Grønkjær , Martin Charlier , Olivia Medin , Ståle Holgersen","doi":"10.1016/j.polgeo.2025.103390","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.polgeo.2025.103390","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>Sweden has swiftly transitioned from being considered a progressive pioneer in climate mitigation to the forefront of late obstruction. The proximate cause was the general elections in 2022, after which the Sweden Democrats (SD) gained authority over the country's climate policies. This paper explores how the far right turned Sweden from a (reputed) pioneer of climate mitigation to an obstructor, and discuss if this transition is also an expression of a ‘green national paradox’. Through interviews with SD members and analysis of political documents, we observe how the SD <em>explicitly</em> and <em>extensively</em> exploits Sweden's progressive image to justify its obstructionist climate agenda. Focusing on energy and transportation policies, our study delves into the SD's perception of Sweden's global climate role and discusses how this is used by the far right in their policies towards climate mitigation.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":48262,"journal":{"name":"Political Geography","volume":"122 ","pages":"Article 103390"},"PeriodicalIF":4.7,"publicationDate":"2025-07-19","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144665960","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2025-07-16DOI: 10.1016/j.polgeo.2025.103357
Ekin Kurtiç
This article critically examines environmental salvage projects undertaken in northeastern Turkey by focusing on political and technoscientific actors who design and implement them. In 2012, Turkey's first project to salvage rare plants before their submergence in a dam reservoir was implemented in the Çoruh Valley. This was the first instance of resettlement and restoration efforts associated with large dams to encompass plant life. A few years later, when another dam upstream was to be built in the same valley, fruit trees and fertile soil were designated as valuable ecologies to be salvaged. By examining these state-led projects, this article examines the inextricable relationship between ruination and restoration, in which state officials and experts play a central role. I argue that state-led salvage projects legitimize and exacerbate the very ruination they claim to mitigate by portraying it as inevitable. The governmental practice of making nature movable is a salvage work that ends up moving nature out of the way of infrastructure and extraction projects.
{"title":"Salvage work: The making of movable nature for post-submergence life","authors":"Ekin Kurtiç","doi":"10.1016/j.polgeo.2025.103357","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.polgeo.2025.103357","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>This article critically examines environmental salvage projects undertaken in northeastern Turkey by focusing on political and technoscientific actors who design and implement them. In 2012, Turkey's first project to salvage rare plants before their submergence in a dam reservoir was implemented in the Çoruh Valley. This was the first instance of resettlement and restoration efforts associated with large dams to encompass plant life. A few years later, when another dam upstream was to be built in the same valley, fruit trees and fertile soil were designated as valuable ecologies to be salvaged. By examining these state-led projects, this article examines the inextricable relationship between ruination and restoration, in which state officials and experts play a central role. I argue that state-led salvage projects legitimize and exacerbate the very ruination they claim to mitigate by portraying it as inevitable. The governmental practice of making nature movable is a salvage work that ends up moving nature out of the way of infrastructure and extraction projects.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":48262,"journal":{"name":"Political Geography","volume":"121 ","pages":"Article 103357"},"PeriodicalIF":4.7,"publicationDate":"2025-07-16","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144634137","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2025-07-16DOI: 10.1016/j.polgeo.2025.103389
Emily Benton Hite , Sarah Posner , Jerry K. Jacka
Two decades on, we seek to expand Peluso and Watt's seminal 'Violent Environments' (2001) with the advent of decarbonization efforts to transition to a low-carbon future, which can have violent outcomes for residing communities. Our expanded political ecology of violence coalesces the violences of extractivism inherent in the transition, which manifests at varying tempos (slow to fast) and degrees of legibility (invisible to visible). Our research in Costa Rica and Papua New Guinea highlights the violences that progress in new environments shaped by historical processes of colonialism and imperialism, accumulation by dispossession, climate change, and decarbonization efforts, among others. We offer to reorient our theoretical agenda in the era of the 'capitalocene' that critically identifies, scrutinizes, and attends to the myriad forms of violence that are correlated with a low-carbon energy transition. In conclusion, we urge social scientists to invoke a thoughtful engagement with violences, recognizing conflicts embroiled in politicized decarbonization efforts.
{"title":"Violent environments and the low-carbon energy transition: Cautionary tales from Costa Rica and Papua New Guinea","authors":"Emily Benton Hite , Sarah Posner , Jerry K. Jacka","doi":"10.1016/j.polgeo.2025.103389","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.polgeo.2025.103389","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>Two decades on, we seek to expand Peluso and Watt's seminal 'Violent Environments' (2001) with the advent of decarbonization efforts to transition to a low-carbon future, which can have violent outcomes for residing communities. Our expanded political ecology of violence coalesces the violences of extractivism inherent in the transition, which manifests at varying tempos (slow to fast) and degrees of legibility (invisible to visible). Our research in Costa Rica and Papua New Guinea highlights the violences that progress in new environments shaped by historical processes of colonialism and imperialism, accumulation by dispossession, climate change, and decarbonization efforts, among others. We offer to reorient our theoretical agenda in the era of the 'capitalocene' that critically identifies, scrutinizes, and attends to the myriad forms of violence that are correlated with a low-carbon energy transition. In conclusion, we urge social scientists to invoke a thoughtful engagement with violences, recognizing conflicts embroiled in politicized decarbonization efforts.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":48262,"journal":{"name":"Political Geography","volume":"122 ","pages":"Article 103389"},"PeriodicalIF":4.7,"publicationDate":"2025-07-16","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144633781","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2025-07-15DOI: 10.1016/j.polgeo.2025.103381
Lela Rekhviashvili, Aleksandra Aroshvili
Based on an analysis of the Rioni Valley Movement and the historical transformation of energy politics in Georgia, we challenge prevailing explanations of the promotion and contestation of hydropower infrastructure as driven by homegrown authoritarianism or Russia's (neo)imperial politics. Instead, we propose a framework of coloniality of infrastructure and green extractivism to study Georgia and other parts of the postsocialist East alongside the postcolonial contexts of the global South. The East increasingly resembles these contexts, exhibiting new iterations of coloniality in relation to the West/North, and serves as one of the frontiers of green extractivism. We argue that derisking has become integral to the mode of regulation that underpins green extractivism – a mode of capital accumulation by dispossession and appropriation in peripheries. Derisking creates an unequal distribution of risks and returns by requiring states to commit their fiscal capacities to future-proof investor returns at all costs. It assures that renewables are not just extractive, or harvesting energy, but extractivist, or serving distant people and geographies while aligning with the profitability needs of financial capital and the consumption needs of decarbonizing classes. Derisked renewables inflict harm locally and deepen the subaltern integration of (sub)national and world-regional peripheries within the capitalist world-ecology.
{"title":"From derisking to green extractivism: The Rioni Valley Movement and the coloniality of renewable infrastructure in Post-Soviet Georgia","authors":"Lela Rekhviashvili, Aleksandra Aroshvili","doi":"10.1016/j.polgeo.2025.103381","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.polgeo.2025.103381","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>Based on an analysis of the Rioni Valley Movement and the historical transformation of energy politics in Georgia, we challenge prevailing explanations of the promotion and contestation of hydropower infrastructure as driven by homegrown authoritarianism or Russia's (neo)imperial politics. Instead, we propose a framework of coloniality of infrastructure and green extractivism to study Georgia and other parts of the postsocialist East alongside the postcolonial contexts of the global South. The East increasingly resembles these contexts, exhibiting new iterations of coloniality in relation to the West/North, and serves as one of the frontiers of green extractivism. We argue that derisking has become integral to the mode of regulation that underpins green extractivism – a mode of capital accumulation by dispossession and appropriation in peripheries. Derisking creates an unequal distribution of risks and returns by requiring states to commit their fiscal capacities to future-proof investor returns at all costs. It assures that renewables are not just <em>extractive</em>, or harvesting energy, but <em>extractivist</em>, or serving distant people and geographies while aligning with the profitability needs of financial capital and the consumption needs of decarbonizing classes. Derisked renewables inflict harm locally and deepen the subaltern integration of (sub)national and world-regional peripheries within the capitalist world-ecology.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":48262,"journal":{"name":"Political Geography","volume":"121 ","pages":"Article 103381"},"PeriodicalIF":4.7,"publicationDate":"2025-07-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144634070","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2025-07-09DOI: 10.1016/j.polgeo.2025.103388
Govand Khalid Azeez, Jonathan Symons
Recent efforts to articulate a “socialist ecomodernist” politics have spurred debate over the relationship between Marxism and ecomodernism. Degrowth-aligned socialists critique ecomodernism for its productivism and naive techno-optimism; ecomodernist socialists respond that ecomodernism's grounding of ecological politics in human material needs and focus on production's technological metabolism broadly aligns with historical materialism. This paper first outlines the homologies and contradictions between Marxism and ecomodernism and then turns to one area of potential dialectical synthesis: addressing capitalism's ecological crises requires a systematic account of technological innovation. To this end we put forward eleven axioms distilling Marx's philosophico-anthropological account of technology. These axioms reflect Marx's understanding of technological innovation as both a source of tension, since productive forces consistently outpace the social world and the relations of production, and crucial to transcending class societies. We argue that a Marxist response to climate breakdown must address how a communist movement will manage the unintended, indirect ecological impacts of production. Marxists have always understood that the proletariat must control the means of production in order to address class-based inequality. In the era of climate breakdown, Marxists must be equally explicit about technological innovation. If we are to protect nature while progressing toward Marx's “realm of freedom”, the task now is also to seize and reconfigure the means of innovation.
{"title":"Seizing the means of innovation: On the relationship between Marxism and ecomodernism","authors":"Govand Khalid Azeez, Jonathan Symons","doi":"10.1016/j.polgeo.2025.103388","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.polgeo.2025.103388","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>Recent efforts to articulate a “socialist ecomodernist” politics have spurred debate over the relationship between Marxism and ecomodernism. Degrowth-aligned socialists critique ecomodernism for its productivism and naive techno-optimism; ecomodernist socialists respond that ecomodernism's grounding of ecological politics in human material needs and focus on production's technological metabolism broadly aligns with historical materialism. This paper first outlines the homologies and contradictions between Marxism and ecomodernism and then turns to one area of potential dialectical synthesis: addressing capitalism's ecological crises requires a systematic account of technological innovation. To this end we put forward eleven axioms distilling Marx's philosophico-anthropological account of technology. These axioms reflect Marx's understanding of technological innovation as both a source of tension, since productive forces consistently outpace the social world and the relations of production, and crucial to transcending class societies. We argue that a Marxist response to climate breakdown must address how a communist movement will manage the unintended, indirect ecological impacts of production. Marxists have always understood that the proletariat must control the means of production in order to address class-based inequality. In the era of climate breakdown, Marxists must be equally explicit about technological innovation. If we are to protect nature while progressing toward Marx's “realm of freedom”, the task now is also to seize and reconfigure the means of innovation.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":48262,"journal":{"name":"Political Geography","volume":"122 ","pages":"Article 103388"},"PeriodicalIF":4.7,"publicationDate":"2025-07-09","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144581069","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2025-07-03DOI: 10.1016/j.polgeo.2025.103382
Nick Dorward , Sean Fox , Kristian Hoelscher
Cities, and the process of urbanisation more broadly, have long been associated with political change – and democratisation in particular. However, there is little cross-country empirical research on the relationship between urbanisation and political change, and a tendency to conflate urbanisation with industrialisation and economic development. This gap is significant for two reasons. First, many of the hypothesised mechanisms linking urbanisation to political change are associated with socioeconomic changes driven by industrialisation and economic development. Second, many low- and middle-income countries have undergone rapid “urbanisation without industrialisation”. What then are the political consequences of urbanisation without industrialisation?
To answer this, we draw a key conceptual distinction between urbanisation – the increase in the relative share of a country's population living in urban areas – and urban population scale – the absolute size of urban populations. While much of the literature focuses upon the political implications of urbanisation, we argue that the sheer scale of urban populations may be more consequential for political change. Specifically, we suggest that although the hypothesised associations between urban living and democratic preferences among citizens are weak, urban living facilitates political engagement, and hence large urban populations may stimulate political change.
We test this hypothesis with cross-national regressions analysing the determinants of levels of democracy and episodes of political regime transformation since 1960 in 161 countries. We find no association between levels of urbanisation or urban population size and levels of democracy. By contrast, we find a positive and significant association between urban population size and political regime transformations, with a bias towards democratic change. Our study offers important insights into the relationship between urbanisation and political change and the political implications of rapid urbanisation without industrialisation unfolding in many parts of the world today.
{"title":"Urbanisation, democracy, and political regime transformations","authors":"Nick Dorward , Sean Fox , Kristian Hoelscher","doi":"10.1016/j.polgeo.2025.103382","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.polgeo.2025.103382","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>Cities, and the process of urbanisation more broadly, have long been associated with political change – and democratisation in particular. However, there is little cross-country empirical research on the relationship between urbanisation and political change, and a tendency to conflate urbanisation with industrialisation and economic development. This gap is significant for two reasons. First, many of the hypothesised mechanisms linking urbanisation to political change are associated with socioeconomic changes driven by industrialisation and economic development. Second, many low- and middle-income countries have undergone rapid “urbanisation without industrialisation”. What then are the political consequences of urbanisation without industrialisation?</div><div>To answer this, we draw a key conceptual distinction between <em>urbanisation</em> – the increase in the relative share of a country's population living in urban areas – and <em>urban population scale</em> – the absolute size of urban populations. While much of the literature focuses upon the political implications of urbanisation, we argue that the sheer scale of urban populations may be more consequential for political change. Specifically, we suggest that although the hypothesised associations between urban living and democratic preferences among citizens are weak, urban living facilitates political engagement, and hence large urban populations may stimulate political change.</div><div>We test this hypothesis with cross-national regressions analysing the determinants of levels of democracy and episodes of political regime transformation since 1960 in 161 countries. We find no association between levels of urbanisation or urban population size and levels of democracy. By contrast, we find a positive and significant association between urban population size and political regime transformations, with a bias towards democratic change. Our study offers important insights into the relationship between urbanisation and political change and the political implications of rapid urbanisation without industrialisation unfolding in many parts of the world today.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":48262,"journal":{"name":"Political Geography","volume":"122 ","pages":"Article 103382"},"PeriodicalIF":4.7,"publicationDate":"2025-07-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144535921","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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